Colin LinkedIn31 Jan 2023 12:47
Fascinating developments coming out of California regarding legislation for #driverless #trucks. As reported here, the California Labor Federation, #Teamsters Joint Council 7 and Teamsters Joint Council 42 announced #AB316, “The #Autonomous #Vehicle Public #Safety Act”. The legislation requires human safety operators to be present in #AVs weighing over 10,000 pounds.
Link to the text of AB 316 Act is here: https://lnkd.in/dMU8mkKt
Check out the rhetoric: "Reckless companies want free rein to put huge driverless vehicles on the road, at the expense of our safety and good, middle-class jobs. We are all at risk if these vehicles are on the road unregulated,” said Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, leader of the California Labor Federation. “New #technology should make workers and our communities more safe, not less. That’s why we’re demanding trained safety operators in #automated trucks—a policy that will save lives and jobs. A win-win."
Many AV tech companies pivoted to robo-trucks in recent years, in the mistaken belief that the development of the #technology was easier than for robo-taxis. That belief overlooked the fundamental fact that public roads are #complex not #complicated. It also overlooked basic physics.
Consider, momentum equals mass times velocity. Thus a truck traveling at 50mph weighing 80,000-pounds has the same momentum as a 4,000-pound passenger car traveling at ... 1,000mph.
Driving a fully-laden truck is an extremely serious responsibility for road safety, but many tech companies attacked the role of truckers simply to further their business prospects.
Big tech has used every legislative trick open to them in the last couple of years to get the cards stacked in their favor for AV deployments (read Philip Koopman on this). Now the Teamsters are fighting back by demanding trained safety operators. This will be epic to watch.
The simplest solution to improve road safety is for truck operators to install robust #driver #monitoring #systems #DMS that monitor for #distraction, #drowsiness, and #impairment. This is technology which helps truckers to do their jobs, and can be retrofitted to existing fleets. Expect to hear a lot more about this tech in the months ahead.
To those people who say that driver monitoring is at best an interim solution (on the path to autonomous vehicles) and at worst already obsolete, I say wake up and pay attention to legislative developments like AB 316. The tide is turning against autonomous tech in 2023.
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